Språk

If you want to see some interesting coinages, innovative grammar and spelling, and language generally at play then you could do worse than look at Twitter. In fact trying to track the various new usages would be enough to keep a blogger happy full time. So just a dip in the water, that’s all

Radio 1 DJ Annie Mac tweeted (see previous post on this verb) from Glastonbury during the closing set by Blur: “There is serious group huggage going on in a muddy field at glasto.. This too much”. The ‘group hug’ is only a late 20th century phenomenon in itself, conceived of Friends, The Spice Girls and a general encouragement of touchy-feeliness by those who know what’s best for us. And now we have ‘group huggage’, more like an activity than an act. It’s a productive little suffix, old -age. It’ll go on just about any little noun you fancy. Up for some drinkage tonight? Or maybe some filmage? No? Just a sandwich then? Oh

Miss Mac also brought us the (clean) use of ‘kotch’ as a noun meaning ‘chill out time’ or something lazy like that: “Jus come back to the hotel for a shower and a kotch. It feels weird to be in a building..” She wasn’t the only one with relaxation on her mind this weekend. Wimbledon 6th seed Andy Roddick twittered thus: “ok so i definitely heard a guy use the term “chillax” today and he was dead serious……….” This one’s been around for a while – hence the number of pages devoted to it on the Urban Dictionary – but Roddick claimed never to have heard it (”people really say that??? seriously??? with a straight face???” was his next twitter)

But A Rod is too late on the case – ‘chillax’ is already destined for the knacker’s yard. As is the danger with any slang term, it’s well past its use by date. Witness this entry on the UD: “chillax: Is commonly used by wiggars, posers, and wannabes. These people try to use this to be cool when they know they aren’t” (a ‘wiggar’ by the way is another blend – the ingredient words should be fairly obvious). The OED it ain’t

But Twitter can have a serious side. Well, when the media get hold of a story it can. And who’s in hot water? None other than one of our favourite high street retailers: Habitat have been hashtagging and have got burned! Reports the BBC: “Furniture store Habitat has apologised for causing offence after accusations it exploited unrest in Iran to drive online Twitter users to its products. Keywords – called hashtags – such as ‘Iran’ and ‘Mousavi’ were added to its messages so people searching for those subjects would see the firm’s adverts”. Here’s one of the bad examples: “#MOUSAVI Join the database for free to win a £1,000 gift card”

But then again what they couldn’t get away with on Twitter the BBC have done for them. At least now everyone knows about their database. It’s still the media stalwarts who can help you most

The end of week one at Wimbledon, and already we have had dutiful overuse of the commentators’ hardy perennials great, epic and rollercoaster to describe the action. We now know what Hawkeye is, what it’s used for and that it doesn’t work after 8.30 at night. We’ve had a liberal sprinkling of players bossing rallies. We’ve even had a few squeaky bum times borrowed from football (no box seats borrowed from cricket yet though). Regular Språk readers will have seen all that stuff coming

Sadly, there’s only one roof in SW19 that anyone’s talking about and so it’s referred to plainly as The Roof and everyone understands we’re talking about the Centre Court covering – thus there has been no opportunity to further the minority-interest debate: is it retractable or protractible? (and the natural secondary question: why is retractable -able and protractible -ible?) Perhaps we’ll have to die wondering

Anyway, the most pleasing aspect of the BBC’s online text commentary so far? Linguistically speaking of course. Well, a straw poll (orig. US straw vote, says OED) has come up with this from day 5:

“1750: So what happened to all this rain, eh? Those in the know said we were dead certs to get a downpour today but…. nothing. Roof shmoof”

And what is the shm in ‘roof shmoof’? Why it’s Yiddish shm-reduplication of course! So versatile that you can use it in many many imaginative ways: bagel shmagel, strawberries shmawberries, McEnroe shMcEnroe, blog shmog, Språk shmåk, etc etc. See? Hours of fun

As far as the 21st century saga goes, the Brad Pitt / Angelina Jolie / Jennifer Aniston story has a lot going for it. Not least magazine sales (as well as the best blend of modern times: Brangelina). This piece in The Guardian highlights just how flimsily-based the sensationalist journalism can be. No surprise there, right?

But perhaps you’d be interested to know about the demise of the two-way true-false distinction, a dichotomy which has obsessed our politicians, lawmakers and poets since time immemorial (= ‘before memory or record’ while we’re on the subject). Now no longer. The celebrity machine has spoken. Instead we now have an inbetween category – neither lie nor truth: “A tabloid version of a fact isn’t exactly a lie,” is how one editor at a prominent celebrity weekly puts it. “But it isn’t the truth. You know what I mean?”

Well sure. Kind of. So it must be one of those half-truth things we hear about. A little bit true a little bit false. Perhaps there are three categories of the true-false type: Truth, Lie, Half-Truth. Or is it actually a scale? Can something be more true than something else? Or more false? Maybe we’ve had points on this scale for a while: a white lie for example, a lesser lie. And it can just depend if it’s a glass half-empty or half-full view whether you call something not-entirely-true-not-entirely-false a half truth or a white lie

It’s a bit like fruit, you see. An apple is considered to be more of a fruit than a courgette. But both are still fruit in a categorial sense. It’s just that one is more typically fruity than the other. If someone offered you some fruit you wouldn’t ask for courgette (would you?). Don’t take my word for it. All sorts of studies have been done on this

All that is prototype theory – the idea that we have prototypical examples for various concepts – and takes us into the murky field of Semantics, so let’s leave it at that. Suffice it to say that you’ll never look at the humble courgette/zucchini the same way again: crisper drawer or fruit bowl?

Oh please send me a text Björn

Wimbledon. Tennis players grunting. Ballboys running frenetically. Fans queueing overnight for tickets. A topsy turvy world. And the BBC covers it in multimedia ways. Including radio. Which medium affords much opportunity for studio anchors to go to roving correspondents on location. A situation which gave rise to a very understandable misunderstanding today

Roving correspondent: “Got a text from Björn Borg in Paris did Robin Söderling”

Studio anchor: “I thought you were going to say you got a text from Björn Borg in Paris – I would’ve been mighty impressed”

Studio anchor wasn’t the only one to be led up the garden path. I also thought that it was going that way

So what did our roving correspondent do? Went against the normal word order of English, that’s what. Instead of SVO (subject, verb, object) – as in, Robin got a text from Björn in Paris – Mr Correspondent went all VOS on us: [V: got] [O: a text from Björn Borg] in Paris did [S: Robin Söderling]

Which is the word order you’d expect if the correspondent were speaking, say, Fijian or Malagasay. But in English it seems a bit unusual and old-fashioned – old-fashioned in the sense that it can come across to the listener as a little rural rather than old-fashioned in the sense that it sounds lovely and literary. That’s in particular because going VOS in English forces us to put a form of do, a.k.a. the dummy auxiliary in there (did Robin Söderling ooh-aar)

The problem was that nowadays when you hear got at the start of an utterance then you think the speaker’s going to say something about himself, with I as the understood but absent subject. As in -

A (pretending to be nonchalant): Got a text from Björn Borg in Paris

B (pretending to be nonchalant): Oh did you?

A null subject construction that one. And that’s funny because it happens a lot in speech, with lots of verbs not just got, whereas it’s not supposed to happen in English at all. Null subjects are something languages like Italian and Spanish can do, but English supposedly not. But then, why not? If we understand it (with certain exceptions like when the speaker wants to go all VOS on us) then there’s no harm done. We drop a surprising amount out of speech. Especially subject pronouns. Especially in the first person singular, when you’re talking about you. And when you’re telling a story. Listen out for it. Is everywhere

The Guardian used its blog to link to a few of the best accounts on other blogs of cyclists’ accidents, at the same time inviting readers to respond with stories of their own

The responses so far range from the horrific (an Aussie’s brush with a 4WD, unconsciousness, river currents, a hungry crocodile and a great white shark smelling blood… The ending? Jaws choked on the inner tube apparently) to the stupid (cyclists running red lights and suffering the consequences) to the unfortunate. And that’s where the linguistic point of interest comes in

louliddiard (let’s call him Lou and assume it’s a man) tells of the time he was ‘car-doored’ (note in passing: innovative use of compound noun as verb) in London and sent flying. Perfectly within their rights you might think, Lou proceeded to let the culprit know what he thought of her in no uncertain terms, with finest Anglo-Saxon included (our swear words – except for damn and bastard, hardly our strongest – mostly have reached us from Old English, or a Germanic language at least, so why do we say ‘excuse my French’ ?)

But then, Old Lou realised children were present (it being ok to swear at women these days, it seems) in the back seat of the parked car and an instinctive sense of decency kicked in: “I of course started my angry tirade of swearing until I realized I was outside a school and she had been dropping her kids off. Doesn’t excuse the car-dooring but I did feel bad when I saw her kids in the back seat listening to my choicest swear words”, admitted Lou

Now, we only have one side of the story but on the face of it you’d think Ol’ Lou would be quite justified in letting the odd expletive fly against the careless motorist. So why feel ashamed that children should turn out to be in earshot? Well, of course, it’s something to do with the taboo values which we associate with these words – which in themselves are just like any other words, but by cultural convention have have come to stand for something much more than their literal meanings

These words have an effect on us, emotionally, psychologically, neurologically – that’s according to mad hair professor Steven Pinker in any case. He proposes that swear words are stored as memorised chunks in the right side of the brain – which is more involved in emotion – rather than the usual left sided store for language. A specific part of the brain – the amygdala, a primitive part strongly involved in emotional reaction – seems to play a central role in swear word storage. If you happen to have a brain scanner over someone who hears a swear word, then the amygdala will respond more strongly than if non-taboo words are heard. In this way, a swear word is like an emotional jolt to the hearer

And of course, despite the best efforts of Lou and the rest of us to protect the young, swear words are passed on from generation to generation. Though some may wish to be rid of them entirely, in so many ways they perform essential – or at least useful – communicative functions: signalling emotion, triggering disgust, indicating earthiness or saltiness of character (depends whether you find yourself on land or at sea), and the indispensible ‘go-to’ word when you stub your toe

We’re in the thick of the English cricket season and already it’s clear which are to be the vogue phrases of the summer. Box seat – as in, “The Netherlands are in the box seat here” and used at least three times per match of the Twenty20 World Cup, seemingly under contractual obligation. And ask. Almost always collocated with big. It’s usually a ‘big ask’ we speak of. Not a ‘quite big ask’. Never a ’small ask’. As in, “the West Indies need 3 to win from their final over and that’s not a big ask”. Or (an actual example here), “South Africa need 86 from 54 balls and that’s a big ask” (exclaimed Dermot Reeve on BBC Radio Five Live)

Etymologically, ‘box seat’ presumably comes from the metaphorical idea of being in the driving seat – the box seat being the driver’s seat in an old fashioned horse-drawn carriage. ‘Ask’ being used as a noun is new to British English, and has already been scorned by TW. Its meaning is more like ‘requirement’ or, more figuratively, ‘test of character’ than the ‘question’ or ‘enquiry’ meaning carried by the verb. And guess where we got it from? Our friends in Australia of course, who first used it in writing in the late 1980s according to the OED. They mess with our word classes as well as our cricketing self esteem, those Antipodeans

The good news for any who may dislike these turns of phrase is that both belong very much to the shorter forms of the game, when the number of overs bowled is limited and the setting and reaching of targets is requisite and not just optional (as it can be in a Test match if a draw will do). So this means the phrases will be less in evidence by the time the main event of the summer – The Ashes series against Australia – comes round. Instead, we’ll have ample opportunity to trot out those other well worn English cricketing cliches: ‘batting collapse’, ‘weary bowlers’, ‘captain sitting dejected on the balcony’. Look forward to it

There are many surprises in this article about Neil Armstrong’s celebrated transmission from the surface of the Moon: “One small step for man. One giant leap for mankind” (did he or did he not say, ‘one small step for a man’?)

The first surprise which strikes you might be that anyone still cares about this. Especially given that the phrase as it was recorded has gone down in history as such and is still immediately recognisable

The second, though you may have known this already, is that Armstrong maintains he meant to say ‘a man’, but wasn’t sure if he actually did – sparking the explanatory theories that either radio static or Armstrong’s drawl obscured the most keenly pursued indefinite article of all time

The third is that there’s such an occupation as ‘forensic linguist’. Yes, ever since CSI made forensics sexy, we even have detective linguists these days. Well, there’s been one of them in a professional sense. There may be many amateurs out there

James R Fitzgerald was the FBI’s man of words for 20 years and is best known for his involvement in the case against Theodore ‘The Unabomber‘ Kaczynski. Fitzgerald matched the written style of the anonymously published Industrial Society and its Future (nicknamed ‘The Unabomber Manifesto’) with that of Kaczynski’s private writings seized by FBI, providing crucial evidence for the prosecution

So be careful what you write. How you construct sentences, phrases and idioms can be surprisingly distinctive. But above all, don’t do anything the FBI wouldn’t like you to be doing

The troubleshooting pages. Now that’s the section of a manual you never want to see. Because it always means you’ve hit a snag in setting up your computer, using your iPhone, constructing your flatpack furniture, etc. But it’s always a case of trial and error isn’t it? ‘If the problem is this, try X. If the problem persists, try Y. If the problem persists, try Z. And so on…’

So it’s mildly discomforting to know that an Airbus spokesman says that to deal with the faulty air speed readings on their A330 model – a possible contributor to the loss of Rio-to-Paris flight 447 somewhere over the Atlantic – “flight crews should maintain thrust and pitch and – if necessary – level off the plane and start troubleshooting procedures as detailed in operating manuals”

That makes it sound so calm – which we can be sure the flight crew are – but also as if there’s so much time up there. You know: make a cup of tea, settle down to find the appropriate section of the manual in your language, get to grips with the jargon, the diagrams, the gist of what you have to do… Oh well, best for the rest of us not to dwell on such matters. Perhaps aircraft instruction manuals are a different breed from the usual indecipherable doorstops we’re so familiar with

So let’s move away from such anxious thoughts and consider the linguistic element to this post: troubleshoot. Clearly a combination of ‘trouble’ and ’shoot’. The OED comments that originally this was not the military or hunting term that it might appear to be – the shooting involved was metaphorical from the outset. At first, a troubleshooter was “a person who traces and corrects faults in machinery and equipment on a telegraph or telephone line”

At some point between its origins in the late 19th century and the present day, it’s developed a meaning synonymous either with consultant (”A self-proclaimed expert that extorts inflated fees from a host company in return for vague and predominantly incorrect business advice”, the Urban Dictionary). Or more commonly something like, ‘person on verge of burning instruction manual out of despair as to why this f#$%ing thing won’t work’

But still. That is an everyday experience. Let us be reassured that the authors of the Airbus operating manuals are clear, concise and entirely successful in communicating their solutions. And that the flight crew are quick readers

So who’s the fastest linguist in the world? If there were a linguists-only track race tomorrow, who’d win it?

We can forgive Noam Chomsky if he’s a little slower out of the blocks, now he’s halfway through his 81st year on the planet. Steven Pinker’s hair would be his parachute. And David Crystal has more the David Bedford look of a long distance runner rather than a Usain Bolt paceman

In fact, everyone else may as well prepare to race for second place: for none other than Christine Ohuruogu, current Commonwealth, World and Olympic 400m champion, has a linguistics degree. From UCL no less. It just goes to show that studying linguistics need not be a hurdle to future success

A new event for the next Linguistics Olympiad?

Obsession. Some collect Top Trumps. Some catch butterflies. Some intend to visit the stadium of every football league club in the country. 92 grounds on an annually changing list. That’s tough. Not to mention expensive, time consuming, masochistic… But it’s nothing compared to starbucking – attempting to have a coffee in every single Starbucks the world over. Such is the contribution to the human race of ‘Winter’ (formerly known as Rafael Antonio Lozano Jr), a 37 year old software engineer from Houston

That’ll be more than 12,000 cups of coffee. The same coffee everywhere. There must be more to life. But not in Winter’s mind there isn’t. He’s three quarters of the way there and has so far spent $100,000 dollars on his campaign, not to mention 12 years and all apparent contact with reality

“My project is not about the coffee, it’s about the experience”, he says. Oh dear. Let’s hope he doesn’t come to rue those words when pulling in to the Baldock Services outlet

But the point of the post is: starbucking from the verb, to starbuck, presumably. A prime example of a freshly minted one-off word (because no one will do it again, will they?)